Posts Tagged ‘physics’

Some of a woman’s fondest childhood memories are times she spent with her dad. My dad was a world class physicist. If I had a dad who was a musician I would have played music with him. If my dad was a carpenter I would have hammered nails with him. My dad was a physicist so I did physics with him.

When I was 6 years old I came up with my own theory of universal order. I noticed that when I woke up in the morning my shoes were not where I had left them. They were often under the bed but definitely they were not side by side as I had so carefully placed them the night before. So I went to my dad and told him my theory that the earth turns so fast gravity is not strong enough to hold things in place on the floor. He did the coolest thing; he respected my theory and suggested we test it.

That night after I took off my shoes we placed them on the wood floor in my bedroom and my dad took a piece of chalk and drew an outline of the shoes, like one of those crime scene body outlines. If my theory was true in the morning my shoes would be outside the line.

The next morning when I checked our experiment and saw that the shoes were still inside the chalk outline I had a corollary to my theory. If the force from the earth’s rotation is stronger than the force of gravity, chalk was stronger than both. Chalk keeps shoes in place.